Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday September 24, 2009 @05:00PM
from the grab-a-bag-on-your-way-home dept.

Matt_dk writes "Images of recent impact craters taken by the HiRISE Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed sub-surface water ice halfway between the north pole and the equator on Mars. While the Phoenix lander imaged subsurface ice where the top layer of soil had been disturbed at the landing site near the north pole, these new images — taken in quick succession, detecting how the ice sublimated away — are the first to show evidence of water ice at much lower latitudes. Surprisingly, the white ice may be made from 99 percent pure water."

The claims look as spurious as cold fusion, and despite obvious violations of the laws of thermodynamics the idiots love to talk about how "hydrogen fuel cells" are recharged from "tap water" as if releasing hydrogen from water to use in a fuel cell didn't consume more energy than it makes available.
So, you're right: water as an energy source doesn't make sense.
But I'm still surprised that we're not already talking about using it as such.

Uranium won't get us back off the planet. Solar works well enough for short-term power, even all the way out at Mars. But it's a death sentence to explore Mars without enough fuel to get us back off the ground, so if we can find something we can use/refine as return fuel, it'll make an initial trip that much more likely.

I'm not sure that's really dogma. Sure, it's not widely accepted that there is life on Mars, and a number of people think it's unlikely, but there's quite a lot [amazon.com] of fairly open discussion [nasa.gov] about the possibility [nasa.gov].

I see no evidence to convince me that any type of life exists on Mars, now, or ever.

That's probably because the type of life you seem to have in mind is pretty specific - by the rest of your comment: intelligent, large enough to be visible, and both located near and willing to interact with things that we've dropped on the surface.

There's a lot of living stuff right here at home that doesn't fit any of those categories, so there's no reason to automatically assume that there can't be any life at all on Mars.

The more we learn about the physics of fusion the more we realize that we did not grasp all of the complexities of building a working fusion reactor. We've gone from Q 10 for a commercial reactor so we are at least getting closer to our goal of commercial fusion. The question is whether the upward trend in Q gains will continue in the future. If they do then it is quite conceivable that we will have a prototype reactor up and running in 30 years, if not, we'll learn a lot about the physics involved.

Rocket propulsion is dangerous, extremely expensive and rather primitive when you think about it.

State of the art, it is.

Luckily for the world, a new form of transportation and energy production technology will arrive soon, one based on the realization that we are immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles. This is a consequence of a reevaluation of our understanding of the causality of motion. Soon, we'll have vehicles that can move at tremendous speeds and negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring damages due to inertial effects. Floating cities, unlimited clean energy, earth to Mars in hours, New York to Beijing in minutes... That's the future of energy and travel.

Observation first, flying cities later. We haven't observed hypothetical effects that would allow the technologies you causally (heh heh) list. And an immense ocean of energetic particles and "causality of motion" (whatever that means, if anything) do not imply flying cities. Show us the effect experimentally before you tell us how wonderful it will be.